It essentially offers a pumpless liquid cooler, which can dissipate massive amounts of heat by boiling the cooling fluid -- water -- in microchannels. (Source: School of Mechanical Engineering, Purdue University)

Purdue has implemented and tested the nanotech cooler and expects to bring it to market with a few years. (Source: Purdue University School of Mechanical Engineering)

Forget traditional metal block coolers a nanowick could remove 10 times the heat of current chip designs

A
collaboration of university researchers and top industry experts has created a
pumpless liquid cooling system that uses nanotechnology to
push the limits of past designs.

One fundamental computing problem is that there are only two ways to increase
computing power -- increase the speed or add more processing circuits.
Adding more circuits requires advanced chip designs like 3D chips or, more
traditionally, die shrinks that are approaching the limits of the laws of physics as applied to
current manufacturing approaches. Meanwhile, speedups are constrained by
the fact that increasing chip frequency increases power consumption and heat,
as evidence by the gigahertz war that peaked in the Pentium 4 era.

A team led by Suresh V. Garimella, the R. Eugene and Susie E. Goodson
Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University, may
have a solution to cooling higher frequency chips and power electronics.
His team cooked up a bleeding edge cooler consisting of tiny copper spheres
and carbon nanotubes, which wick coolant passively
towards hot electronics.

The coolant used is everyday water, which is transferred to an ultrathin
"thermal ground plane" -- a flat hollow plate.

The new design can handle an estimated 10 times the heat of current computer
chip designs. That opens the door to higher frequency CPUs and GPUs, but
also more efficient electronics in military and electric vehicle applications.

The new design can wick an incredible 550 watts per square centimeter.
Mark North, an engineer with Thermacore comments, "We know the wicking part of the
system is working well, so we now need to make sure the rest of the system
works."

The design was first verified with computer models made by Gamirella, Jayathi
Y. Murthy, a Purdue professor of mechanical engineering, and doctoral student
Ram Ranjan. Purdue mechanical engineering professor Timothy Fisher's team
then produced physical nanotubes to implement the cooler and test it in an
advanced simulated electronic chamber.

Garimella describes this fused approach of using computer modeling and
experimentation hand in hand, stating, "We have validated the models
against experiments, and we are conducting further experiments to more fully
explore the results of simulations."

Essentially the breakthrough offers pumpless water-cooling, as the design
naturally propels the water. It also uses microfluidics and advanced
microchannel research to allow the fluid to fully boil, wicking away far more
heat than similar past designs.

This is enabled by smaller pore size than previous sintered designs.
Sintering is fusing together tiny copper spheres to form a cooling
surface. Garimella comments, "For high drawing power, you need small
pores. The problem is that if you make the pores very fine and densely
spaced, the liquid faces a lot of frictional resistance and doesn't want to
flow. So the permeability of the wick is also important."

To further improve the design and make the pores even smaller the team used
50-nm copper coated carbon nanotubes.

The research was published in this month's edition of the
peer-reviewed journal International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer.

Raytheon Co. is helping design the new cooler. Besides Purdue, Thermacore
Inc. and Georgia Tech Research Institute are also aiding the research, which is
funded by a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant. The
team says they expect commercial coolers utilizing the tech to hit the market
within a few years. Given that commercial cooling companies (Thermacore,
Raytheon) were involved, there's credibility in that estimate.

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I think its closer to a phase cooling system than a peltier system. Your right you would still need a heatsink, but phase change is definitely more efficient than solid state heat pumping. Solid state heat pumping usually creates more heat than it moves. It looks like this might be able to fit a phase cooling system in the size package that we are used to seeing a peltier system, which would be interesting. I wonder if it requires any external power source.

If that's the best model it's probably not going to gain any ground in the consumer market, because like water cooling it's going to end up too fiddly. If it can work as a sealed, self contained unit like heatpipes OTOH we could see some really nice gains.

This actually does sound like a new flavor of heatpipe rather than some sort of exotic sub-ambient cooling solution. I wouldn't weigh too much on that lab pic as that is just a demo unit for debugging and testing purposes I'm sure.

I'm not sure of the physics behind "nanowicking", but as Sanity said this wouldn't make much sense if the system had to reach 100C to boil water in order to get the coolant moving. I would assume some type of alcohol mixture would be used for consumer grade sinks or maybe lower the pressure in the pipes so it can boil more readily.

Just seems like a super heatpipe to me but it's definitely a more efficient design than what we use now so the improvements could be drastic. Now we just have to play the waiting game like with other nanotech. All these sweet applications for nanotubes but where are the products you can actually buy that use them...

Air is evacuated so that the boiling point of the water is lowered. How much they evacuate sets the boiling point. That's why some coolers work better on overclocked, high temperature processors, than they do on just a standard load.

And Yes this new development is in the wick structure inside of the heatpipe. Where smaller is better.